Over the last 16 months I’ve became obsessed with the concept of vision

It all started after closing our seed round at homie. Startups burn money quickly and you don’t want to be asking for more before making progress on your original pitch or developing a new bigger, bolder, better thesis

Before we had money, our focus was naturally limited by the scarcity of resources

After the raise instead we had to intentionally plan where we wanted to invest our capital (namely talent’s time and company’s money)

We’ve spent about 4 months actively working on defining what we wanted to be remembered for and the end result unearthed the founder’s true ambitions and ultimately the company trajectory

In Yogi Berra’s words

If you don’t know where you are going, you may never get there

With a well defined vision in place I was able to decide whether I could see myself part of that dream or not, and I didn’t

I joined alan right after because of the team, so skilled that I almost thought it didn’t need a well defined vision to succeed. Not so fast

Without a vision to shape intention, skills pull in many directions thus creating a drag that will zero the initial potential

The ability to articulate a vision is key to success wether you have a strong team or not, whether you’ve raised capital or not, wether you are taking over real-estate or healthcare

The act of defining ambition it’s a rite of passage for any founder, one that becomes more important as the company matures

I eventually boiled it down to this